I first noticed this feature in mid January while creating new ad campaigns in Power Editor, but I didn’t take a screenshot for some reason – and that was a mistake.

Just a few days later I couldn’t find this feature in any of the ad accounts that I’m managing, so I thought I might be imagining things… but I wasn’t – luckily, multi-product ads arrived to Facebook and it looks like they’re not going anywhere any time soon.

Ever since the official introduction of multi-product ads in July 2014, I was eager to get my hands on them. After all, it’s a very promising thing – instead of showing just one product, we can create a small gallery and display up to three products at the same time, increasing our chances of raising interest and generating ad engagement.

Sadly, this feature was only available to Preferred Marketing Developers at the beginning, making it unaccessible to the majority of advertisers. Now, however, this will be available to everyone who knows how to use the Power Editor tool, and I’m sure it will be added to the self-serve advertising tool in the future too.

So today I’ll to share a detailed tutorial on how to create multi-product ads by using Facebook’s Power Editor. By the end of it you will know the ins and outs of multi-product ads, so that you can go ahead and use them to boost your business results, but first…

What exactly are multi-product ads?

Designed for direct response objectives, multi-product ads showcase 3-5 products within a single ad unit that’s in-stream and native on Facebook across any device. Each product highlighted has its own image, description and click target that directs people off of Facebook to a specific location on your website.

Essentially, you can now promote a single ad that includes multiple images and links, instead of having to create separate ads. This allows you to present a few potential products within the same ad, giving more opportunities to the audience to engage with it, for example:

Among the benefits of using this type of ads Facebook shares improved click-through rates, finding new customers and decreasing costs per lead – sounds pretty sweet, right?

Now that you know what multi-product ads are and you how you could use them, let’s dig into the step-by-step guide!

(Even if it’s the first time you’re using the Power Editor, I hope to make everything as clear as possible – if you still find anything missing or complicated, drop me a message and I’ll do my best to clarify it!)

See the entire step-by-step process in the presentation, or read it in more details below:

How to create multi-product ads in Power Editor:

1. Download to Power Editor:

First, open the Power Editortool (P.S. it only works on Google Chrome browsers).

Once in Power Editor, click “Download to Power Editor” button at the top of the page, select your primary ad account, and hit “Download” – this will load all the data about your campaigns to the tool.

2. Create New Campaign:

Next, click on the ‘+‘ (plus sign) to create a new advertising campaign.

Choose either the “Website Clicks” or the “Website Conversions” campaign, enter the campaign’s name, and hit “Create“.

Then, navigate to the “Ad Set” tab.

3. Create New Ad Set:

Similarly, click on the + sign again under the Ad Sets tab, enter the name for the ad set, and click “Create“.

[ For those that might still be new to Facebook advertising, the Ad Set level is where you choose all the main campaign settings, including the budget, the schedule, the target audience, the placement and the bidding type. To learn more about it, have a look at this article: Updates to the Ad Campaign Structure on Facebook. ]

4. Specify Ad Set Settings:

If everything went well, you will now see these settings under the ad set:

As you can see under the Ad Set, you will need to specify:

Budget – Per day or Lifetime – set the maximum budget for the ad set, just be careful, once you change it from Per day to Lifetime it will jump to $350 automatically,

Schedule – choose a start and an date, or leave it to run continuously,

Ad Scheduling – you can also choose specific days of the week and even hours, on which the ads will be active, but you need to have an end date and lifetime budget set for that,

Audience – set the target audience you want to reach,

Placement – multi-product ads are only available on desktop news feed and mobile news feed placements – choose them both or just one of them, depending on your preferences,

Optimization & Pricing – the place where you choose your bidding type. If you leave it as default, you will be charged based on the Optimised CPM (a.k.a. optimized cost per mile or optimised cost 1000 impressions) model – Facebook does a pretty great job with optimising your campaigns, so most of the time I’d just leave it as it is. Otherwise, you can choose the CPC bidding type (cost per click) or the ordinary CPM bidding type.

So we have a campaign, we have an ad set too, it’s time to move to the actual ad!

5. Create New Ad:

Navigate to the Adstab in Power Editor, click the + sign to open a window, select the campaign and the ad set, name your ad and click Create.

Perfect! You’ve just created an ad, what’s left is just designing it.

6. Set Up Multi-Product Ad:

First, select your main Facebook page – the ads will appear as coming from that page:

Then, move to Create Ad section and choose Multiple images and links in one ad (sadly, if you cannot see it there, you probably don’t have the access to multi-product ads yet – Facebook is gradually releasing it to everyone around the globe):

You will then need to enter the post Text that will appear as an introduction to the ad (at the top of the images, same for all links), a Destination URL, a Headline, and an optional Description for each of the links.

Next, select an image (recommended size 600×600 pixels) or just let Facebook load one automatically from the destination page.

As most images on websites are not in a 1:1 ratio, they will look bad on multi-product ads, so I advise you to design new pictures at the recommended size and use them for the ad campaigns. (And don’t forget the 20% rule – you can’t add more than 20% of text on any image).

If you did that for all the links you want to promote, you should see already see the preview of the ad – congratz!

Here’s how it would appear on desktop news feed:

And here’s how the same multi-product ad will appear on mobile news feed placement:

Finally, add the See More URL– this will be displayed at the end of the ad. Your Facebook page’s profile picture will automatically be used for that, which isn’t perfect. If you’ll be constantly using multi-product ads, it’d be a good idea to update your profile picture to something that’s also at least 600x600px in dimensions, so that it fits in nicely.

7. Choose Creative Optimization and Advanced Tracking:

Next to an ad you should also see the Creative Customization option – Automatically select and order images and links. If you leave it ticked, Facebook optimise your ads automatically to show those images that perform the best at the beginning:

Also, as with any other website clicks or website conversions ad, you can add a URL Tag and attach a Tracking Pixel.

For URL Tags, you can add the UTM parameters, such as utm_campaign=XYZ, which will allow you to identify each of the ads or campaigns in Google Analytics, making it easier to identify your ad performance.

As for Tracking Pixels, you can use an existing Facebook conversion pixel or create a new one and attach them to an ad. The tracking pixel has to be added to a conversion page on your site, for example, on the /cart, /checkout or /thanks page.

8. Upload!

Go through the entire campaign again, check your Ad Set preferences, especially the schedule and the budget, look at the ad you just created and make sure you haven’t left any typos or mistakes.

If you’re happy with everything you see, click the big green button at the top of the page, Upload Changes, and you’re done!

Congratulations!

Creative Uses of Multi-Product Ads:

While I could only add three images to a multi-product ad, others reported that they can add up to 5 images and links in total, and you could go even up to 10 images via third-party tools.

Even with three images it’s already a great way to showcase multiple products with the same theme, for example:

Even better, employ storytelling and use multiple images to tell a story about how your products can make people’s lives easier:

Scale: Promote all of your products with unique creative without having to configure each individual ad

Always-on: Set up your campaigns once and continually reach people with the right product at the right time

Cross-device: Reach people with ads on any device they use, regardless of their original touchpoint for your business

Highly relevant: Show people ads for products they are interested in order to increase their likelihood to purchase

What that means is that businesses will now be able to upload their entireproduct catalog, create custom audiences based on the exact products that have been viewed, added to cart or purchase, and use a custom ad template to promote all of those products to their audiences automatically.

Although that has been available through Facebook Partner Exchange (FBX) program with tools like Perfect Audience or AdRoll in the past, Facebook will offer a greater integration across all the ad placements, making the advertising more effective and, I hope, less expensive too.

The dynamic product ads will also integrate smoothly with multi-product ads, which is immense – just think of the power of advertising a few different products, that have been seen by a shopper but not purchased yet, in a single ad, automatically. *heads exploding*

Companies like Target or Shutterly, who had an early access, reported a 20% increase in conversions and 20+% increase in click-through rates, so this feature should be extremely exciting to any retailers and ecommerce sites.

Facebook hints that this will very soon be available in Power Editor, so let’s keep our eyes open.

In the meantime, you can go through their guide to learn more about what the dynamic product ads are all about.

I hope you found this guide useful. As always, if you have any questions, let me know!

Cheers and talk soon,
Adomas

Question to You: Will you be using multi-product and dynamic product ads? If so, how? – Let me know in the comments below!

Well, I’ve used carousel ads mostly for advertising products and blog articles – they can go together nicely too, and people are engaging.

And what kind of non-product businesses do you have in mind? I saw some B2B companies promote their articles and free guides too.

I’d think even purely services-based companies could use the carousel ads by telling their story in a few simple steps? Similarly to the Love Found example above (the dating site)? I mean, if they’re already running multiple ad variations, why not use those images in a carousel ad as a test? 🙂

Thanks for sharing your experience. What are the kind results you’ve seen with carousel ads though? And what about those results relative to single image posts?

The reason why i’m asking this is because I’ve heard from some Facebook advertisers who experience very flat kind of experience for carousel ads as compared to their image posts ads. One of the hypothesis is that carousel ads are easily identified as ads while for single-image post ads, people don’t really imagine or think of them as ads. So I’d love to hear if you’ve got some successful counter examples.

Generally, mobile news feed ads get the highest CTR, then – desktop news feed. But with carousel ads I’m getting even better results – the CTR can get close to 4% and even 5%, depending on audiences and products.

Talking about easier identification compared to single images that ‘blend in’ – I personally think that’s a bad attitude. Think about it – when was the last time you saw something and didn’t realise it was an ad from the first few seconds? 🙂 At least I know my feed (friends and pages I follow) so well, that anything new just completely pops out – I immediately know it’s an ad. And I’d treat anyone else in a similar way – I think the audience is smart to identify the ads. However, some of them will willingly give you their approval by engaging with the ad, while others will ignore it.

My take on this – I don’t want to disguise my ads, I don’t want them to blend in, I just want to get it in front of those that would need the product the most. Of course, I will make them as beautiful as possible, but laser-specific targeting will make ads much more effective than the type of an ad. I’ve had cases when an ad had a broken link (mistake in unpublished post), and people still found a way to find the offer and convert.

The biggest problem/challenge with B2B companies – they’re mostly promoting ‘on-demand’ things, like on-demand services, software, tools. And for those services Facebook will never be as effective as Adwords – you might be showing ads about your law company for 5 years to me on Facebook, but if I don’t have any legal case, I won’t click on it.

So, I’d generally go with the B2B content promotion on Facebook, articles/ebooks that solve people’s problems, with the hope of capturing their contacts (newsletter, leadmagnets), bringing them back through remarketing, and also using email marketing and SEM campaigns to nail the sales. And I found carousel ads to be as effective with the content promotion as single image ones. That’s my take on it 🙂